A completely driverless version of the luxury Audi A8 saloon has whisked movie star Daniel Brühl to a gala event at Germany’s Berlinale Film Festival, posting another milestone on the path to chauffeurless cars.
The twelve-cylinder, long-wheelbase A8 L W12 picked up the internationally renowned actor and his girlfriend Felicitas Rombold from their hotel in Berlin and drove them directly to the Berlinale Palast.
It travelled in a suitably smooth and stately fashion by registering prominent architectural features along the driving route, comparing this logging with precise mapping and synchronising the information with data from its own calculation of its movements.
The aim was to make the grand entrance to the red carpet similar to the way an experienced chauffeur would drive – a very gentle and smooth approach and progressive, carefully modulated braking to a stop at the kerbside.
For years now, Audi has been testing its systems for piloted driving under increasingly more challenging conditions. The first tests were conducted in 2009 at a salt lake in the USA. One year later, an Audi TTS conquered Pikes Peak in the Rocky Mountains without a driver. In 2013, Audi test platforms performed piloted driving for the first time on public roads in Nevada.
In the same year, the brand demonstrated piloted parking – the driver exited a car at the entrance to a parking garage, and the car parked itself autonomously. Later, the driver ordered the car back to the garage exit with a smartphone app.
Demonstrating just how dynamic piloted driving can be, an Audi RS 7 Sportback drove a lap at race pace on the grand prix circuit in Hockenheim in October 2014. The following year, Audi sent piloted test platforms onto public roads near the CES and CES Asia consumer electronics trade shows – from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas and in the urban traffic of Shanghai.
In October 2015, engineers demonstrated automatic emergency evasive manoeuvres in a test vehicle with moving obstacles in the urban environment.
